Dvořák In Iowa (2020)

'Dvorak in America' articles never mention how Gottschalk was hard at work integrating African American folk music several decades earlier. There wasn't much appetite in the U.S. at the time but it was wildly popular in Europe...

Le Bananier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfuv2GzNF-8

Playing Dvorak's American Quartet was one of the best musical experiences of my life, and I'm grateful to the natural environment around Spillville, if it could enable Dvorak to produce such a work. There's nothing American about the music, by the way; it's just as satisfyingly Bohemian as the rest of Dvorak's music, even if he was self-consciously using a pentatonic scale, and may have tried to sound American. I think he was so perfectly steeped in his own culture and his own sound that anything he wrote came out sounding like him and his place. (And by the way, best viola melody ever.)

I didn’t know that Dvořák is famous outside Czechia and even outside Europe.

I went to the same school as the author. Never thought I’d run into someone I knew from Iowa on HN! Enjoyed the historical read.

ahem... I have been writing with a dvorak keyboard for more than a decade.

The move from qwerty to dvorak took me 4 months of PAIN. You must have a strong will to keep going, because the interference of real life will generate a strong drag to qwerty.

And I got a few ortholinear keyboards with that (next is columnar/ortholinear DYO mechanical keyboard with RISC-V 64 bits firmware... ok ok ok, that's all theory, I may end-up with a staggered qwerty if I am too busy doing something else and I do run out of keyboards).